SMARTPHONE TRAVEL RESERVATIONS INCREASE TO 50%

In Germany, 50 percent of vacations and 32 percent of travel packages are booked online. This emerged from a study by Google, TNS, GfK and TUI Deutschland about mobile travel reservations in the country.

In Germany, the use of smartphones is becoming increasingly important. As much as five out of ten trips are booked on smartphones.

When planning holidays, the Internet is now indispensable for most Germans. Nine out of ten trips are planned online, five of which on smartphones. When it comes to travel reservations the vacationers combine online-media and advice from travel agencies. 42 percent of Germans book their trips at travel agencies only after having gone through various reviews.

According to the study “The Mobile Traveller”, 50 percent of travel bookings are currently completed on the Internet. For package holidays, the rate is 32 percent (2012: 22 percent).

The so called ROPO booking (Research Online, Purchase Offline) is indeed a popular form of travel reservations (42 percent use this method). This form is even more popular when it comes to package holidays, with 58 percent of bookings done this way.

The study concludes that travelers do not only change between different online and offline channels back and forth. They also use different devices. During the research, an Internet user switches between different devices on average 26 times. They always use the device that appears to be most appropriate and time-saving. Here the winner is the smartphone, which plays the biggest role in the research phase as well as in the destination itself.

Additionally, every second person booking the holiday ends up using the smartphone for research. It is also striking that mobile devices are used spontaneously. 69 percent of smartphone searches happen unplanned and are often short search moments.

Market researchers from GfK and TNS investigated holiday trips (holiday packages, hotel and flight bookings) that have been booked online or offline (travel agency, e-mail, mobile phone) on behalf of Google and TUI Deutschland. The results are representative for the German online-population over 18 with Desktop research. In the Mobile Traveller study they asked travelers online, taking both desktop and smartphone research into account.